Civil War? If It Starts It Will Be Uglier Than Anyone Can Imagine 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

“The first time I walked up on some really, honest to God dead soldiers, I must have jumped back six feet. Burnt, charred, frozen in time at the moment of death & look of shock & horror upon their faces.” —  J J in Comments

Even if a day of reckoning arrives it’s unlikely to be one of our choosing. Like everything else of actual importance, it will burst on us like a sudden downpour, unbidden and unexpected. The list of survivors will be lengthy if not all inclusive. Specifics of how it all went down will be uncovered and argued generations later, to the interest of no one save antiquarians. —  OlRemus @ Woodpile Report

Everybody needs to just Chill. Out. Needs to sit down. Needs to take a breath and say the Serenity Prayer. And mean it.

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Fighting Back Against Globalism Requires An Honest Movement To Decentralize Reply

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Strategy, Uncategorized

By Brandon Smith

Alt-Market.Com

Over a decade ago, critics of the liberty movement would often argue that it was not enough to simply point out all the problems plaguing our economy — we needed to also offer solutions. Of course, a common Alinsky tactic is to demand your opponents solve all the world’s ailments before they can earn the right to complain. “If you can’t give us a solution, then stop going on and on about the problem,” they would squawk incessantly like parrots.

I don’t agree that our right to analyze the instabilities of our financial system is predicated on our ability to fix the issue outright. In fact, that sounds rather insane. How can we fix the problem if we don’t educate the public on the problem first? However, I do think that the only people who have the drive and the knowledge to ultimately come up with a solution are those in the liberty movement. Who else is going to try? Who else is even qualified?

I have seen many ideas come and go over the years. The thing about fixing what is broken is that while you might get most people to agree on the problem, getting a majority of them to agree on a solution is a nightmare. Once enough people agree on a solution, you then have to find a way to motivate them to act on it. The masses often want desperately to help themselves, they just don’t like it when a lot of effort or sacrifice is required.

This is why we only tend to see organized activism and a push toward self-sufficiency AFTER a crisis has already struck. Most human beings require obvious incentive before they become motivated. They need immediate gratification. The people that can see the long game, who can see the incentives years or generations down the road, we call “leaders.” The hope is that one day every individual can be educated to the point that they can self-lead; that each individual will become an innovator and problem solver in their own right.

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PETA is ridiculed on Twitter for claiming milk is a ‘symbol of white supremacy’ Reply

by • Political Correctness/Totalitarian Humanism, Uncategorized • Tags:

A Facebook reader comments in response to this article:

“It is really interesting how disconnected these people are from ordinary human beings, even liberal Americans. I was trying to think of how to differentiate, and it’s this: there is High Church Liberalism and Low Church Liberalism. Low churchers are still in the mindset that being mean to homosexuals isn’t nice, that rich people have too much money, and that you should give extra help to brown people. High Church liberalism takes their egalitarianism to newfound heights, where having a white baby is racist. Since these people almost never church together they are not aware of how out of sync they are. As the High Church is gaining more and more ascendance, becoming a major faction within the State Church of America they are bringing regular Sunday liberals into contact with their theological psychosis and are actually alienating people who would – if they didn’t hear them speak – they would consider to be Brothers in the Lord.”

By Leah McDonald

The Daily Mail

Animal Welfare Group PETA has bizarrely claimed that cow’s milk is a symbol of white supremacy.

PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) originally published a blog post titled ‘Why cow’s milk is the perfect drink for white supremacists’ last year.

The animal rights group renewed that claim on Friday when it tweeted a link to its post again.

The group urged people to drink dairy-free alternatives, as dairy products are ‘linked to developing heart disease as well as prostate, breast, and ovarian cancer’.

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Larry Krasner’s Campaign to End Mass Incarceration Reply

by • Activism, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Law/Justice, Police State/Civil Liberties, Strategy

I’m inclined to say “I’ll believe it when I see it” but is this a case of the system actually working?

By Jennifer Gonnerman

The New Yorker

Krasner asked his young prosecutors, “Who here has read Michelle Alexander?”

Photograph by Jeff Brown for The New Yorker

Until Larry Krasner entered the race for District Attorney of Philadelphia last year, he had never prosecuted a case. He began his career as a public defender, and spent three decades as a defense attorney. In the legal world, there is an image, however cartoonish, of prosecutors as conservative and unsparing, and of defense attorneys as righteous and perpetually outraged. Krasner, who had a long ponytail until he was forty, seemed to fit the mold. As he and his colleagues engaged in daily combat with the D.A.’s office, they routinely complained about prosecutors who, they believed, withheld evidence that they were legally required to give to the defense; about police who lied under oath on the witness stand; and about the D.A. Lynne Abraham, a Democrat whose successful prosecutions, over nearly twenty years, sent more people to death row than those of any other D.A. in modern Philadelphia history.

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Unraveling Political Theory – 5 Political Debates That Are False Dichotomies Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right, Uncategorized • Tags:

“In episode 13 of Unraveling Political Theory, Tim and Keith will be discussing 5 different political debates that are false dichotomies. To understand the world of politics and change it for the better, it’s paramount that people begin to study political theory and the ways in which it has manifest throughout history up into the present day. By bringing light to the origins of political and philosophical thought, the present day becomes all the more explainable because one is now able to see the logical progression of such manifestations.”

We Know You’re Full of Shit 1

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags: ,

By R.J. Jacob

Ryan Anarchy

Last week on KTP, Keith and I discussed data from a new study by an independent group of researchers showing that 80 percent of Americans see themselves as against political correctness. Shouldn’t surprise you. Most people don’t even pretend to act “shocked” when someone acts racist or sexist in public. It’s the phony rich people on TV who act like we’re supposed to care about another douchebag and his poetic justice or the next racial/gender/sexual/animal equality BS or whatever it is that we’re supposed to care about this time.

I think one of the main reasons why so many Americans dislike PC is because most Americans aren’t that naive and already know that our news broadcasts are full of shit. In fact, the very notion of talking about what the “political people” on TV are talking about has become a hobby for the more educated and comfortable classes. Most people I know are worried about their bread and butter first and foremost followed by their families. The average person who gives way to the daily grind of “succeeding at life” spends most of his free time drinking, going to the bar, talking to girls, or working out at the gym; and worries about things like family, work, sex, love, depression, trying to save money, and Facebook.

I think “progressive activists” who push PC as a central political social religion have too much free time on their hands. PC anxiety is a luxury for sure. The only people I know who act PC in real life are either lawyers or tech experts with upper-middle-class lifestyles with progressive globalist views or graduate students whose current living situation is comfortable enough to allow them to take up PC as an outward feel-good social hobby while other middle-class progressives mimic the upper-middle-class elite by watching their Real Time with Bill Maher/Anderson Cooper/Colbert Report for rich bitches while the rest of the country doesn’t really give a shit.

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In Defense of National Anarchism 2

by • Anarchism/Anti-State, Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

When I first learned that I had been published on Attack the System, a site notorious for being something of a safe space for national anarchists, I was both confused and intrigued. Intrigued because the national anarchists have a rather unsavory rep among their fellow anti-statists as being a kooky breed of quasi white supremacists. And confused because I happen to be an aggressively queer Marxian syndicalist. But also being a hard-luck, technologically challenged, writer who’s shit is often too radical even for the fringe, I decided I could hardly look a gift horse in the mouth. So I said fuck it, why not?

Then something very strange happened. The national anarchists turned out to be human beings and they seemed to legitimately dig my shit. So I put them to the test. I sent them all of my posts, not just the ones I thought wouldn’t offend their traditionalist sensibilities. I sent them candid posts about my own complex gender identity. I sent them posts referencing my past dalliances with communism and my continued admiration for the Black Panthers. I sent them posts in which I openly and gleefully derided the very notions of biological race and gender. I didn’t write these posts with the national anarchists in mind, it just happened to be the kind of shit I write about and I made zero attempt to shield my new audience from it. To my surprise, not only did every single one of those posts get published, they were a hit. Attack the System even went so far as to make me an editor, which was particularly kind considering that I can barely edit my own work, let alone anyone else’s.

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Welcome, New Readers! 1

by • Activism, Anarchism/Anti-State, Uncategorized

Recently, AttacktheSystem.Com has generated a surge of traffic due to a range of projects we have been associated with. For those who are unfamiliar with ATS, I would suggest reading our Statement of Purpose, along the following three articles first in order to find out what we’re about.

Anarchism or Anarcho-Social Democracy?

Liberty and Populism: Building an Effective Resistance Movement for North America

Philosophical Anarchism and the Death of Empire

The first article was written circa 2000/2001 during the peak of the anti-globalization movement. The other two were written circa 2003/2004 following the beginning of the Iraq War. While some of the content may be slightly dated, these core ideas remain the foundation of our outlook.

Many of our newer readers are coming to us from the anarchist movement. Let’s just say we offer an alternative perspective to the “anarcho-MSNBC” line that is presently dominant in the North American anarchist milieu. Make up your own mind.

Political Commentators That Are Not Totally Worthless Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Uncategorized

Some political commentators actually worth reading or listening to:

Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, Ben Norton, Caitlin Johnstone, Glenn Greenwald, Tucker Carlson, Brian Becker, Pat Buchanan, Rania Khalek, John Kiriakou, Abby Martin, Robbie Martin, Adam Proctor, Eugene Puryear, Aimee Terese.

From Marxists to paleoconservatives, they offer a range of alternative perspectives to the FOX-CNN-MSNBC axis of bullshit.

Russia-gate as Symptom: The Crisis of American Community Reply

by • Uncategorized • Tags:

By far the best article on Russia-gate to date.

By Paul Grenier

Telos

Are the divisions that fragment the United States primarily driven by some deep flaw in its political life, or was the United States doing just fine, thank you very much—until Russia came along during the 2016 presidential race and started sowing division and dissension?

Framed that way, the question answers itself. Whatever some state-sanctioned Russian actors may have done to pester the American political process, it is obvious that America’s deep divisions exist for reasons having essentially nothing to do with Russia. They long precede the last election.

Even if Russia’s interventions into American electoral politics turn out to be more significant than they presently appear, this cannot change the more fundamental reality that our confrontational posture, including vis-à-vis Russia, is by no means something external to the United States’ Lockean liberal political concept.

That there is something intrinsically confrontational about that political concept, at least in the sphere of foreign affairs, has been suggested by, among others, Richard Sakwa. For Sakwa, the post-Soviet settlement with Russia was undermined almost from the very start by a monist worldview in both the United States and Brussels that would brook no alternative perspectives. The result has been a de facto monologue between “the West” and post-Soviet Russia rather than a genuine, transformational dialogue.

Similarly, John Mearsheimer calls out ruling elites in the United States for their “liberal intolerance” and their failure to take seriously the possibility that other sovereign states, including Russia, might have a different perspective regarding everything from culture to their own vital interests. This habit of nearly hermetic intellectual self-enclosure on the United States’ part helped precipitate the still-ongoing crisis in Ukraine.[2]

In Russia-gate, this same closed system of confrontation and self-enclosure appears once again in a new form, one rooted in domestic U.S. processes, and with Russia’s relation to the matter being almost wholly instrumental. If there is something novel about Russia-gate, broadly considered, it would appear to be the striking lowering of standards for reasoned argument and proof.

In short, Russia-gate should interest us not for what it can teach us about Russia (almost nothing) but for what it can teach us about ourselves.

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Keith Preston: US has been seeking global hegemony since end of WWll Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy, Uncategorized

Press TV. Listen here.

The US has long been seeking global domination but some countries won’t allow that to happen, says an American analyst.

Keith Preston, director of the attackthesyestem.org made the remarks while discussing Russia’s jab at Washington that its “dreams” of becoming the world’s sole superpower would never come true.

President Donald Trump said on Saturday that the US was pulling out of an arms control treaty with Russia, known as the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which bans ground-based medium-range missiles.

That same day, Russia said there was an ulterior motive.

“The main motive is a dream of a unipolar world. Will it come true? No,” a Russian Foreign Ministry source anonymously told RIA Novosti state news agency.

Preston told Press TV on Sunday that Washington has long sought becoming the world’s sole superpower and failed.

“The trump administration’s efforts to withdraw from the particular treaty in question are simply a manifestation a water pattern, which is this idea of global American hegemony” Preston told Press TV Sunday.

When it came to this grand objective, there was no difference of opinion between America’s both major parties, the analyst noted.

In doing so, Washington prefers utilizing the United Nations and other international organizations “because they think this creates a great revere of legitimacy,” Preston added.

Neoconservatives also sought the same goal through promoting an “assertive nationalism” that required bypassing international organizations and exerting direct control over world affairs.

“There is virtually nothing new about this,” the analyst said, noting the past US administrations had also adopted this policy which dated back to the Cold War era.

But, according to Preston, that goal seems far-fetched as of now because there are countries that would not give in to America’s bullying, the analyst concluded.

In the World of American Politics, One Khashoggi Is Worth One Million Yemeni Lives Reply

by • Anti-Imperialism/Foreign Policy • Tags:

A friend tells me today’s Women’s March on the Pentagon only attracted a few hundred people. Meanwhile, thousands will come out to protest Trump, Kavanaugh, the Alt-Right, or “hate.” The American Left makes me want to puke.

By Michael Howard

American Herald Tribune

Jamal Khashoggi e5f4c

At this point we can only assume that the Turkish version of events regarding the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi is true. As always, I’m open to being proved wrong, and it’s certainly incumbent upon Ankara to release the audio evidence of which they claim to be in possession (though this, should it come out, will naturally be dismissed by the Saudis as fabricated or doctored), but the list of plausible alternative scenarios currently stands at zero. Khashoggi went into the Saudi consulate and was never seen again. If he had merely been kidnapped and jailed, we’d have heard from him by now. He would have appeared on Saudi state television and delivered some kind of scripted statement like Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri did last November. The House of Saud appears to prefer this time of year, autumn, for abductions and assassinations.

Five Tribes of American Voters Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism • Tags:

This research more or less confirms the findings of the “Hidden Tribes” researchers with some slight variations.

By Carl M. Cannon

Real Clear Politics

“Every difference of opinion,” Thomas Jefferson warned in his first inaugural address, “is not a difference of principle.” Speaking to his countrymen after an election every bit as bitter as the one that put Donald J. Trump in the White House, Jefferson was trying to soothe the reigning animosity between the nation’s two dominant political parties. “We are all Republicans,” he added. “We are all Federalists.”

Not anymore. In 21st century America, any notion that election results end the argument, however temporarily, is an anachronism. So, too, is the conceit that a nation this large and diverse is divided neatly along “50-50” lines, with half of America’s 253 million adults supporting Democrats, and the other half backing Republicans.

Today, slightly more than one-fourth of registered voters in the United States have political views and social attitudes placing them in the camp of the “Resistance” — to President Trump and the Trump-era Republican Party.

This is one of the five American “tribes” identified in a sweeping new public opinion survey conducted by RealClear Opinion Research, a new service offered by RealClearPolitics. The survey of 2,463 registered voters, conducted Sept. 18-28, was overseen by John Della Volpe, co-founder of SocialSphere Inc., a public opinion and analytics firm based in Cambridge, Mass.

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The Democrats’ Left Turn Is Not an Illusion Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Electoralism/Democratism, Left and Right, Men and Women, Race and Ethnicity

The research that is cited in this article, along with the “Hidden Tribes” report that came out recently, seems to confirm what I have long suspected, i.e. that “political correctness” is the ideology of the mostly white, educated, affluent, left-wing of the upper middle class. This is probably one of the more interesting parts of this article:

“In fact, white liberals are well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues.

Take the issue of discrimination as a factor holding back African-American advancement. White liberals are to the left of black Democrats, placing a much stronger emphasis than African-Americans on the role of discrimination and much less emphasis on the importance of individual effort.

Among white liberals, according to Pew survey data collected in 2017, 79.2 percent agreed that “racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.” 18.8 percent agreed that “blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition,” a 60.4 point difference, according to a detailed analysis of the Pew data provided the Times by Zach Goldberg, a doctoral candidate in political science at Georgia State University.

Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition — in other words, blacks are more conservative than white liberals on this issue.?”

By Thomas B. Edsall

New York Times

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‘Hidden Tribes’ report shows poor prospects for ‘Exhausted Majority’ Reply

by • Culture Wars/Current Controversies, Left and Right • Tags:

It seems that the “exhausted majority” would be the natural constituency for ATS…if only the “exhausted majority” had any kind of critique of the state and/or capitalism (and, yes, I’m fine the Karl Hess version of capitalism).

By Michael Sean Winters

National Catholic Reporter

(Unsplash/Gabby Orcutt)

(Unsplash/Gabby Orcutt)

A column by David Brooks this week pointed to an interesting new survey undertaken by the group More in Common. Titled “Hidden Tribes,” the report, as Brooks rightly notes, “understands that American politics is no longer about what health care plan you support. It’s about identity, psychology, moral foundations and the dynamics of tribal resentment.”

Brooks’ central conclusion is correct: He thinks the core problem with American politics is that it is dominated by the two sets of rich white people who inhabit the ideological extremes, groups the report dubs “Progressive Activists” and “Devoted Conservatives.” Unfortunately for those of us on the left, the first group is only 8 percent of the population and while the second group is but 6 percent, the next closest group, “Traditional Conservatives” identifies 19 percent of the nation’s population and tends to side with the “Devoted Conservatives” on almost all issues. These are the “Wings” that set the tone and the parameters of public debate.

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